The damage that Trump has done–and I agree that he has inflicted serious damage on the reputation and functioning of the federal government, as most exemplified by the public health dumpster fire of government response to the pandemic–is a result of long-standing schisms in American society and the engineered distrust in all government by self-identified radical conservatives.
Trump inflamed and exploited this, but not very competently or even deliberately for the most part. His bumblefuck turn at being the chief executive of the nation instead of one of his failing business enterprises mostly resulted in a bunch of churn but no butter, and some of the dramatic failings of pillars of the conservative moment like the self-immolation of the NRA are in large measure that they no longer had a bogeyman to scare people into believing that the government was coming for all of their guns and most of their money. The elevator pitch for Trump’s White House was basically Arrested Development meets VEEP, with a dash of Heil Honey, I’m Home! And we’re not talking about original series Arrested Development but the Netflix revival series.
Hillary Clinton would have been demonized into being Satan Incarnate and probably goaded into open military interventions; instead we got racial protests that dwarfed conservative and fascist displays, a few dozen miles of “Wall”, and a reputation for being a nation that doesn’t live up to its commitments and deliberately separates immigrant children from parents, which isn’t great but it is a long way from societal collapse, and in some ways really highlighted the effects of inequalities that most middle class Americans didn’t previously understand or care about. There are plenty of other existential threats to the United States as a nation but Donald Trump is just the tick on the ear of a coon hound that is baying and shitting on your porch every morning.
This, as with all such questions about what Trump will do, must be answered with: Trump is a weenie.
He will bluster, he will threaten, he will throw a tantrum, he will bully, he will shout and gather his acolytes, but he will never do anything that comes as a physical cost to himself or requires him to take decisive action.
It’s not as rare as you might think for a narcissist to kill themselves. As a narcissist, Trump is pretty obviously going through this right now:
When the lashing out in anger no longer has any outlet, when he’s kicked out on January 20th; if the MAGA fuckwits then start to lose interest and move on to a new figurehead; if he’s branded a loser, if his crimes are fully exposed and he’s facing humiliation and prison. There’s certainly a psychological path for a narcissist to fall into depression and to suicide.
Yeah, but that doesn’t address his cowardice. He likes to play a tough guy, but he’s a weenie. Put another way, he doesn’t have the huevos to kill himself.
I guess he could just order Stephen Miller to do it for him.
We’re not going to see him jump off Trump Tower, but If he falls into depression it doesn’t take much bravery to do it with drugs, which with his resources he could easily access.
Just the 74 million illegal voters. Other than that, he’s very popular. The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, dickheads, they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.
Or I guess they could just house him at Metropolitan Correctional Center in NYC. Things… happen there.
In all seriousness, I think he’ll bounce before the walls close in completely. Neither Saudi Arabia or Russia have extradition treaties with the US. They do deal rather harshly with people who fall out of favor, though. There’s always UAE or Brunei. Oh, I know. The Maldives.
I can see him flee to another country and the QAnon nut jobs insist that it’s part of his grand plan to take down the Deep State, this time as a puppet master remotely working with his crack team of infiltrators.
I wouldn’t, mainly because of Barron. No kid deserves to experience something like that.
All along, I have speculated that Trump might indeed commit suicide if and when the house of cards collapsed, and few people have agreed with me. Like I just said, I don’t WANT that to happen, but if it did, I wouldn’t be surprised, either.
Nobody wants him and he’s too far in debt to buy citizenship in a country that won’t extradite him back to the US. Trump is probably going to self-pardon and then hide himself away in his penthouse like a cut-rate Bond villain, insisting that any investigation is just a “witch hunt” and trying to get a call though to Fox & Friends, who will collectively pretend that they have a bad connection.
I predict he will spend the whole of 2021 on a grievance tour doing rallies with his diehard supporters but he will eventually get bored of it and try his hand at another tv show always hinting at a 2024 rematch but not really going ahead with it.
I strongly think he despises the kind of people in his crowds because, well, for all his life he made a show of wanting to be in the ‘it’ club with the rich and powerful. Howard Stern said he’d hate to have those kind of people in his crowds stay at his hotels and I’m inclined to believe.